Newsletter

Year will be remembered for who it took from us

Family members console each other as Erk Russell's granddaughter Mandy Russell sings during a funeral service for the former Georgia Southern coach Sunday at Paulson Stadium.

Everybody measures sports years differently, personal results from the latest and biggest games often framing perceived success of the months surrounding them.

So the Saint Vincent's volleyball team that won a state championship will look back on 2006 a little more favorably than, say, the Georgia Southern football team that lost its way this year.

But individual accomplishment or isolated triumph aside, there can be some agreement on what we around here are about to leave.

Because tomorrow's calendar page can't turn fast enough for a Savannah sports community that should want 2007 to arrive as soon as possible.

There are teams and athletes who played their best this year. And there was the standard mirroring of highs and lows for local programs competing against each other, positives equaling negatives and both dictating varying levels of satisfaction.

But anytime you lose as much as Savannah sports did in 2006, it can't be a good year.

Even in an area marked by cheering, there was too much sadness in a year when the city's greatest losses did not occur on any playing field and that will be remembered mostly for the inordinate number of memorial services for local sports figures.

People die every year. It's just hard to remember another year when so many people from the same little corner of town did within such a short time.

The losses within Savannah sports in 2006 ranged from sudden to somewhat expected, taking young people with everything in front of them to those who had already completed meaningful careers.

They ranged from Michael J. Parker, an eighth-grade basketball player who never got the chance to show his skills on the high school level, to James German, who coached at Beach for 30 years and was still shaping lives well after his retirement.

They included Kevin Brophy, an Australian who played at Memorial Day School on his way to the University of Georgia's basketball team, and Dick Stearns, who never lost his Massachusetts accent but became a big part of the Savannah golf scene through the countless lessons he taught and the nine holes he built at Hunter Army Airfield.

And practically no season was spared the sorrow that worked its way through the entire sports year in Savannah.

Summer was not the same after the passing of Jim Bayens, who quite possibly saved professional baseball here when he used his 25 years of experience with the St. Louis Cardinals organization to turn around the local minor league team that went from losing money to winning championships during his tenure as general manager.

Meanwhile Erk Russell's sudden death the day before GSU's first football game set a somber tone for fall long before the program he built stumbled to its worst record in 25 years.

By then, though, the tone of the year had already been set.

Not that Savannah sports won't take plenty of good out of 2006.

It was a year when the city held onto the kind of event it rarely could attract in the past as Liberty Mutual agreed to keep the Legends of Golf here for another four years and when local voters approved necessary and exciting improvements for historic Grayson Stadium.

Several high school teams excelled on the state level while Armstrong Atlantic State sports maintained their across-the-board success and Savannah State might have started to turn a corner.

There were also individual performers and performances worth following all through a year in which Doug Hanzel put together one of the finest seasons ever in Savannah amateur golf, Georgia signees DeMarcus Dobbs and Christy Marshall led a list of local kids who went on to college athletics and Josh Mallard returned to the NFL.

But however much 2006 gave Savannah sports, it will go down as a year that took away far more.